Jay Lee wrote:
Mark Williams wrote:
I have just installed spamassassin v3.0.4 in a test environment (which
is a mirror of the live environment) and have a number of questions,
which I can not see within the manuals/support documentation.
Firstly, this is my configuration:
Server: Linux (RH9.0), with spamassassin installed from
spamassassin.org web site using "make" etc.... (not RPM's). This
machine then runs both IMAP and POP3 for clients. MTA is sendmail
Surely your not going live with a distribution as old and unsupported as
RedHat 9! Do you want to become a spam zombie? I urge you strongly to
look at moving up to RedHat Enterprise Linux 4, CentOS 4 or a recent
Fedora release. Also, you really should stick with the RPMS, it makes
management and future upgrades much smoother.
Client(s): Windows XP. All running Windows XP and MS Outlook 2000. All
users connct to POP3 Server (on Linux machine) and use PST files to
download their e-mail(s).
General: Setup is such that spamassassin is site wide (not per user) -
as per management request. All working fine at the moment - just about
to "switch on bayes"
Questions:
(q1) Given that this is a site-wide installation, how do I get the
requisite 200 e-mails (spam/ham) for spamassassin to work with? Where
should I put these (an individual mailbox)?
Use bayes autolearning so that you don't have to bother to much. Also
setup some aliases like [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] where users can
forward wrongly classified mail for you to reclassify. Don't try to use
someone else's bayes db and don't use just your personal email since it
won't match the bayes characteristics of the entire company. Note that
you can also modify the number of spam and ham messages the bayes db
needs before it starts scoring with these two rules in local.cf:
bayes_min_ham_num 100
bayes_min_spam_num 50
be careful about setting it to low though, the less bayes knows about
your org's email characteristics the more likely false positives are.
Jay
I just wanted to add something to this quick. You may also want to
(perhaps even *should*) alter the autolearn thresholds if you are going
to use bayes autolearning. The default values have been seen to
autolearn in the wrong direction sometimes. I have changed mine to:
bayes_auto_learn_threshold_nonspam -0.1
bayes_auto_learn_threshold_spam 10.0
Also, note that while users can forward email to the spam@ and ham@
addresses referred to above, they must do so as an attachment so the
original email is untouched. Regular forwarding will add/alter headers
which will cause bayes nightmares.
And finally as a general note..a lot of people seem to not use bayes for
one reason or another..and tend to have autolearning disabled. However
with the correct settings and some careful monitoring (at least in the
beginning) bayes w/autolearn can work wonders.
BTW, im also running RH9 AND SA 2.64, but this was installed almost 2
years ago ;) Still running great though.
-Jim
